Our graphics to illustrate the potential benefits and potential harms of the AstraZeneca vaccine as announced by the MHRA this afternoon.
Benefits accrued over 16 weeks, at three different levels of exposure to the virus.
Avoidance of ICU admission was chosen as a benefit comparator because the potential harms being illustrated are equally severe.
Of course for every one of these potential ICU admissions there are many many people who might have had hospitalisation or long COVID.
Also important benefits are to other people - the reduction in the potential to transmit it.
On the other side, the harms illustrated are only the blood clots currently being monitored.
Severe allergic reactions (anaphylaxis) are too rare with the AZ vaccine in the UK to illustrate - that could be because precautions are being taken for those with allergies.
Thank you to @HardingProf and @d_spiegel for the underlying maths, and of course all those who collect and analyse this data @MHRAgovuk
Some musings from me on risk perception/communication on BMJ blog today.
We throw numbers around when talking about health risks - they’re a way of precisely defining a concept. But it’s like communicating colour through hexademical codes or wavelengths… bit.ly/32RzXSL
Firstly, the numbers only make sense to those already very familiar with the arbitrary mapping of number to concept. A designer or physicist might instinctively bring to mind a colour when you say 6d46c4 or 350nm, but the rest of us don’t.
Secondly, although the number defines precisely what colour we’re looking at, it doesn’t define what we perceive.
The circles below are both the same colour, but the context makes a difference to perception.
We’ve got a comment in Nature today on why science needs good ‘evidence communication’ and not the typical rules of rhetoric, designed to persuade rather than inform: nature.com/articles/d4158…
Alongside the comment piece, which ironically sets out to persuade you to consider not be persuasive, are our more detailed thoughts on how to do this: media.nature.com/original/magaz…
Consider your own motivations and ethics – you may feel passionately about your work, but how far is it ok to seek to persuade? Compare a doctor talking to a patient, an expert witness presenting evidence in court, a researcher talking in the media…